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Africans Rate Their Countries For Corruption

Africans Rate Their Countries For Corruption

Sierra Leone fared the worst in a survey asking Africans in 34 countries to rate their nations for corruption – 63 percent of respondents said they’d been forced to pay bribes at least once in the previous year, according to a report in BusinessStandard.

Morocco and Guinea came next, each with 57 percent.

Almost a third of Africans have been forced to pay bribes including for medical treatment, according to the Afrobarometer survey, released today. The poorest citizens in each country often bore the brunt of shakedowns at health clinics and hospitals, the report said.

Medical treatment was the second most-common reason cited after paying off officials to obtain a document or permit, said Richard Houessou, head of the Afrobarometer project in French-speaking Africa.

The problem of medical bribes was the worst in Uganda at 46 percent, Swaziland at 41 percent and Niger with 40 percent.

“Among the poorest – those who went without food at least once in the past year – 18 percent had to pay a bribe at least once in the previous year to receive treatment, compared to a substantially lower 12 percent among those who were better off,” the report found.

The survey also found that more than half the people polled were dissatisfied with their governments’ efforts to battle corruption.

Nigerians gave the worst ratings to their government on its efforts to battle corruption; 82 percent said the government was doing fairly or very badly. Other dissatisfied citizens were in Egypt, Zimbabwe and Uganda.

Pollsters with the Afrobarometer project conducted 51,000 face-to-face interviews across Africa between October 2011 and June 2013. The project selected 34 countries to survey but did not include many in Central Africa, leaving out Congo, Chad, Central African Republic and Gabon, according to the BusinessStandard report.